Amid reports that two radical right-wing parties are planning to join forces, the leader of German Jewry warned this week that neo-Nazi extremism, once the province of violent youths, is now spreading to German intellectuals.
Ignatz Bubis, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, issued the warning as the Republican Party and the German People’s Union said they may close ranks to form an ultrarightist alliance.
Neither of the two parties has elected officials serving in the German Parliament, because neither has been able to receive the necessary 5 percent minimum of the total votes required for entry into Parliament.
The Republican Party, the larger of the two, has also done poorly in recent regional and municipal elections.
Republican chairman Franz Schonhuber and DVU Chairman Gerhard Frey urged their supporters this week to set aside their differences in order to achieve strength through “a united rightist defense” in Germany.
Responding to the rise in right-wing activity, Bubis said in a radio interview that new groups of far-right thinkers are more dangerous than neo-Nazi skinheads.
“The state will be able to cope with the violence (of the skinheads), but the intellectuals supply the ideology that lures young people and makes them into violent criminals,” he said.
“This is a recent phenomenon. You do not find these intellectuals among the violent perpetrators,” Bubis added, noting that far-right thinkers deceive themselves into believing that they are simply providing youths with a way to enter the German political process.
“They do not see that they themselves become the ones who give far-right radicals their ideas,” he said.
Bubis expressed similar concerns in Dresden, the eastern German city where he was awarded the Erich Kestner Award for his achievements in advancing liberal ideas. At the ceremony, he expressed concern about the involvement of high-school teachers in rightist political parties.
He also warned of the danger that the radical right would gradually become the “in thing” among German intellectuals.
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